The Tasky Husky project aims to support college students with significant external obligations, like jobs or caregiving, to manage their time and well-being effectively. The central design question is:

How might we empower students with external responsibilities to balance their college experience?

Research Findings

After surveying a total of 19 students who had external responsibilities outside of school, we found four main themes.

Lack of support

Lack of accomodation

Lack of college resources available / known

Difficulty managing time

Design Requirements

We uncovered several critical imperatives our solution directions must address after gathering insights through our survey, interviews, and personas.

The solution should:

• work on a portable device as the student is usually juggling between school and the other responsibilities.

• be social and be able to facilitate networking, information sharing and making communication possible with like-minded people.

• help users manage their time between different spheres of life to enhance their efficiency and help them achieve their goals.

• help students keep a balanced and healthy lifestyle.

  

Refined Design Question

How might we empower students with external responsibilities to effectively balance their time and well-being?

Once we had a working prototype, we conducted 3 usability tests and provided users with tasks to accomplish. Onboarding, daily check-in, and monthly progress and feedback implementation.

Here are the changes we incorporated into the prototype.

This project was completed by a group of graduate students at The University of Washington’s Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) program.

Check out my tasky husky medium article for an in-depth case study :)